Mind you, Piers Morgan came in at number six, and although the Gazette tries to make sense of this by calling him "CNN chief interviewer", he isn't, yet - that's still Larry King for a few more weeks. And everyone's so horrified at the idea of Morgan taking over even Putin's begging King not to go.

So, given that a couple of weak sessions in the ITV fawnopticon is enough to secure Morgan a place in the top ten, there's a sense that - the public side of the poll at least - is more "can you think of someone who might be a showbiz journalist" rather than "who is the best showbiz journalist". Which means that what the Press Gazette has done is find out who writes the celeb column in the most widely-read newspaper.

It'd be interesting to see the list if they'd not thrown in the public's views. You wonder if Gordon would have been on top then.

But he is. How do you account for your success, Gordon?

[H]e insisted that his brand of showbiz journalism is a lot more sensitive than that of a previous Sun era: "I feel like I’ve become the respectable face of showbiz journalism. That’s something I’m trying to do."

Sun hacks have been trying their hardest to insist how much nicer they are than they were in the 1980s since at least the time the paper backed Blair, but that only really amounted to the rag supporting a more comparatively compassionate version of Thatcherism. Now even that's over, the pretence is more hollow than ever.